Book excerpt: First published by Wiley in 1978, this book is being re-issued with a new Preface by the author. The roots of the book lie in the writings of RA Fisher both as concerns results and the general stance to statistical science, and this stance was the determining factor in the author's selection of topics. His treatise brings together results on aspects of statistical information, notably concerning likelihood functions, plausibility functions, ancillarity, and sufficiency, and on exponential families of probability distributions.